3G iPhone Unlimited Data Plan Will Cost $30 Per Month, But You Can Only Activate in Store

The business and pricing details of the new 3G iPhone are starting to trickle out and guess what? There are a few surprises.

AT&T will offer unlimited data for the 3G iPhone at $30 per month for consumers and $45 for business customers. (Voice usage will be billed separately.) But check this: On July 11th, you won’t be activating your phone at home. AT&T and Apple are mandating that all 3G iPhone activations be done in retail locations. And forget about buying a handset online — they’re being offered in brick and mortar locations only.

What does this mean?

Expect hellish lines and long wait times if picking up a 3G iPhone on opening day. Conservative guesses peg the activation times for phones at 10-15 minutes. Yeah sure, in fantasy land maybe. We’re betting that the average activation will be double or even triple those estimates.

Sound like a play to control the sale of black market 3G iPhones and prevent handset hacking? You bet it is. This is the same business model the cellular industry has been using for years to control its hardware and cripple consumers.

The other very big news of the day is that the new agreement between AT&T and Apple ‘eliminates the revenue-sharing model under which AT&T shared a portion of monthly service revenue with Apple.’

This is highly important. Apple used an enormous amount of its clout to negotiate the revenue sharing deal (which was unprecedented at the time) and such a deal has not been repeated by any other manufacturer-carrier deal, as far as we know.

Because Apple will lose a significant amount of money that it got used to cashing in for a whole year, it could also lead to charges for future software upgrades.

What this all means in the overall picture is that instead of "blowing up the wireless industry," as we optimistically claimed back in January, the iPhone really only blew a small hole in the wireless industry — a hole which is now slowly closing up and starting to choke consumers just as they started to get used to their newfound freedom.